Amongst the Gadflies Read online

  Amongst

  the

  Gadflies

  Ford Collins

  Copyright © 2015 Ford Collins

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 1500530883

  ISBN-13: 978-1500530884

  [One]

  A rotting avalanche, discarded hours before from the first-floor restaurant of Central One Plaza, lay shining in the yellow ochre glow of an overhead light.

  Lowell found the heap hosting the usual whirl of insects landing and launching and spinning in ecstasy.

  Straddling the threshold with one foot entering the translucent early evening, Lowell heard a bell signal an elevator’s arrival in the lobby to his back. He heard the constant shush of the Genesee River forty-some feet away. He heard a truck rumble through a parking lot behind a wall to his left.

  He closed his eyes and fine-tuned for the contingent of flies barreling around in broken ovals from air to plastic to air.

  Nothing.

  He turned from the door and walked toward the river, and the clack of the latch punctuated the oddity behind him.

  On a typical weekday, Lowell’s flight from his job as a messenger for a law firm on the building’s ninth floor began through this exit.

  Fifteen steps in his elongated stride and a right turn.

  From there, a few dozen steps to Main Street at the south end of Crossroads Park. A left at the meeting of the downtown’s north-south and east-west axes and he was off, his metronomic legs gliding up Main and across the river.

  This Thursday evening, however, something to Lowell’s left caught his attention between his eleventh and twelfth steps.

  It was subtle, and in the late fall twilight Lowell had to push his glasses up to the bridge of his nose and squint to make out two vaguely man-sized shapes, which froze as he focused. He guessed they were thirty-five or forty feet from him and facing each other.

  The shush of the river swelled in Lowell’s ears.

  Without getting closer he couldn’t make out anything about the men.

  He didn’t care who they were anyway. But he had nowhere else to be at the moment, so he stayed to watch them depart.

  The shapes didn’t move on as Lowell had anticipated, however, and instead violently drew together in an embrace.

  Lowell cocked his head clockwise slightly and watched more carefully, though he was mildly uncomfortable spying on a display of public intimacy.

  The men stepped apart, and the first contact was weak once the single shape returned to two. An open-handed slap from the man on the left to the other man’s cheek, perhaps.

  The second contact, following quickly, was less subtle. Even from a distance, Lowell heard the deep, thumping crack of fist to orbital bone.

  The man on the right stumbled backward, pushing a hand out behind him toward the stone rail at the park’s edge over the river.

  His reflection stepped forward to match his swoon, clutched the reeling man’s lapels to pull him back upright, landed three-four-five more blows to the head, and lifted the wilted body up and over the rail.

  The attacker then stood motionless, not watching the body’s arc into the water, not fleeing the scene, not confronting Lowell, who was sure he was the sole witness.

  Lowell stood nearly as still, only leaning inches and shifting focus from the assailant to the assailed. Or, rather, where he estimated the assailed man’s body should resurface. It remained below for as long as Lowell kept his eyes on the water, no less than two minutes.

  Thumbing his glasses back to the bridge of his nose, Lowell turned toward Main Street, covered the distance to the walkway over the river, and continued home with nothing in particular on his mind.

  [Two]

  At ten o’clock that night, Lowell lay in his bed, flipping through a worn tract of angsty, poorly written poetry foisted on him by a coworker the week before.

  The lent booklet came with an invitation to a reading the coming Sunday evening at a downtown coffee shop that would include the inviter himself as a performer.

  Lowell accepted the wispy collection with an “Ah-heh,” that was most closely akin to a throat clearing, but which could have served as anything to anyone, so the coworker took it as an RSVP Yes.

  Lowell never intended to go. He didn’t intend to read the poetry either, but nothing standing on his bookshelf or lying on his tables had earlier drawn his interest, so he’d fiddled with the pages for a minute or two and carried the poetry to his bed with him to put to use, he was quite sure, as a sedative.

  Covered up to his armpits with sheet and quilt, and twirling the booklet in his fingertips, he discovered with some concern that his cheeks burned terribly.

  Until that point, he wasn’t aware he’d been smiling. It wasn’t something he was typically comfortable doing unless his welfare stood to somehow benefit in return.

  His mind jostled itself to punch through the noises of the day and pinpoint the source of his discomfort.

  He realized suddenly that he’d been subconsciously recalling the events by the river.

  It wasn’t a direct recall. It was more of a pencil shading over the entire event to create a sensory impression that put all of the pieces together in a single, multidimensional expression.

  As Lowell focused, he picked up trees overhanging the edge of the rail and wall at intervals. He hadn’t noticed them earlier, but now found that he’d been in the sizeable shadow of one, which could explain why the men never saw him though he was standing relatively close by.

  He saw the silhouettes of the men in the various steps of their waltz: Still, shock-straight figure ones in a pitch black eleven; rudely drawn halves of an imperfect sphere carved from night, holding each other close enough to share a breath; the halves, again separate in all but the lines of blurred extensions of violence from one pole to the other; finally, the graceful winding down from earth to sea of the broken hemisphere, terminating in a coruscating point of entry, a second origin.

  He examined the event with a clarity that had escaped him at the time it occurred.

  Pebbles lay scattered the length of the park, spread by winds, rain, and shuffling pedestrians over months and years. Orphaned leaves had crumbled off into bits until only mud-brown stems remained, tucked beneath the edges of park benches and rusting garbage cans. Angles, cracks, creases, and lines of walls and windows and flags populated walkways and structures along the perimeter of the park.

  He could even see the sound of the river, in a way.

  It held together as a mass of elongated esses and broken spirals piled upon each other save for where the body had plummeted like a lead ball.

  The light breeze curled similarly overhead, tiptoeing around treetops and whispering away to nothingness. His heartbeat worked outward from his body in small, faint semi-circles before him.

  Wading through the detail with painstaking attention, Lowell found his smile had departed and the aching had stopped.

  In the whole of his sketch, there was no pattern to indicate a single sound from the throats of the men. Not a grunt, a curse, a scream. Not a word. It made no sense.

  Surely a man struggling to survive a vicious beating finds a pocket of primal urgency inside himself to call for help, to plead for his attacker to stop and spare his life? Surely the assailant wants this man to know why he’d chosen for him to die?

  Lowell could make nothing of it, and he began to sweat lightly beneath the covers and along the upper ridge of his forehead.

  He continued to draw the minutes back to himself and push further into them, straining to listen for something. A name. A laugh. A whimper. Anything.

  All of the previously enumerated particles of resonance folded back upon themselves and crossed his path at random, keeping v
igil, it seemed to Lowell, over the men beyond them as if they were protecting the shadows from study.

  From within the growing cacophony, a singular sound broke away and sang in one ear, then the other, and back again. A buzzing whine matching nothing in the image. No lines spun in figure eights. No dots connected in brittle droppings near him, mapping out something practically weightless.

  A moped puttering by behind him on Main Street? An airplane aloft well above his line of sight? The tinny vibration of his phone, tucked in the pocket of his coat?

  He opened his eyes. His arms and chest were tensed, his fists curled under at an uncomfortable angle that pulled the skin of his hands and forearms taut and itching.

  No, the itching was a mosquito that had buried its proboscis well into the back of his left hand. It had fed fully, but was now trapped in the tightened membrane surrounding it.

  Lowell, still pulsing from the disappointment of failing to complete his sketch, missed all signs that the insect was struggling to free itself from him.

  The mosquito continued to draw through the locked hypodermic needle, having injected Lowell with trace amounts of coagulant to aid it in its task, and it swelled nearly beyond capacity.

  Lowell studied it, feeling a sort of beneficence in allowing it to survive at his insignificant expense. He knew it fed in need, not malice. It simply took to—

  His thoughts dissolved as the tiny body ruptured and spit bright red into a bubble encapsulating the miniature carcass.

  Reflexively, he pushed the back of his right hand to his left and pulled them apart, revealing a postage stamp-sized Rorschach test.

  He studied the markings for a moment and said “It looks like my killer.”

  Lowell reached for a handkerchief on the bedside table, wiped off the smears from his hands, put his glasses in their case, and switched off the light.

  In the seconds before Lowell drifted to sleep, it occurred to him that the bloody mirror images of the murderer on his hands had looked not only like the killer, but very much like the man the butcher had slaughtered.

  [Three]

  As Lowell woke the next morning, he wondered why he’d said “my killer.”

  He scratched at the back of his left hand, but even in the weak predawn light leaking around his curtains he could see there was no mark, no swollen reminder of the crushed insect.

  His legs slid slowly to the edge of the bed and swung over, and his feet dropped to the floor.

  Lowell rolled his head, stretching his neck in a counterclockwise circle. At the point of the circuit where the back of his skull dipped closest to his shoulder blades, he decided he meant “my” as possessive, in that he was the entire audience for the show.

  He owned the man who had killed the other as one would own the memory of a performance, a particle left over from a larger mass that had congealed, contracted in a spasm of gravity to balance on a single point of action, and then disintegrated before another could stand witness to it.

  He was tethered to the act as well as the actor, and in a sense he was then the murderer’s keeper.

  The thought of owning another human being by owning the image of their actions intrigued Lowell, but his fluttering mind was too tired to fully unpack something so profound, so instead he focused on getting ready to leave for work on time.

  Thirty-two minutes later, Lowell stepped off the bottom porch stair of the house that held his second-floor apartment, and began walking down Oxford Street to Monroe Avenue.

  From here he would turn right and pass through a mile-long stretch of used book stores, diners, Mediterranean restaurants, pizza joints, coin-op laundry halls, coffee houses, tattoo parlors, and head shops.

  He felt more at ease here than almost anywhere else in the city, mainly because no one cared whether he was there or not. He was never compelled to smile or wave or nod or speak to anyone.

  Packs of pallid teens shambled through and around the stores and shops, slicing through faint wafting curtains of patchouli and olive oil scents all hours of the day, and seemingly every day of the year.

  Their piercings glittered in sunlight or streetlight like lizard tongues flitting out to taste the air around them. Scraps of clothes, stitched, pinned, and taped together, signified the wearers’ places in the elite corps of the emotionally anesthetized.

  Lowell found them entertaining. They fought to be unique and garner status just as all other cliques and groups did, and none of them found it ironic in the least.

  Distasteful bits dropped from the tables of the plain onto the filthy ground below, and the liches lined up to roll in the mess and parade around the stink like badges.

  Their circuitous shuffling—in the door of this barista, this incense seller, this vinyl-only music shop, and out again—wasn’t far removed from the steadily humming swarms over trash bins on every corner of the city.

  If one wanted to be unseen, Lowell understood, one must remove all traces of decay. Detach yourself from all that reeked of waste and wastefulness.

  On cue, a homeless man squatted to defecate on the back wall of the sushi restaurant at the corner of Oxford and Monroe.

  Lowell was less than ten feet from the man, and could smell him even before the greasy, flannel-encrusted phantom had his sweatpants down.

  Lowell imagined all vagrants as ghosts.

  They drifted from one quarter of the city to another, hollow-eyed and hoarse, staring through anyone passing by them, extending hands for food, money, touch. And then they shuffled off again, split soles flapping to the ground under heel, under toe, under heel.

  They rarely made eye contact during sojourns on stoops or benches. They simply sensed passers-by and reached out in any direction of potential interaction.

  Lowell was convinced for the first eighteen months he worked in the city that the homeless there had no eyes. Shaggy brows and hair hid the gaping sockets to avoid scaring away meals.

  So when the defecating man looked up and locked gazes with Lowell, the latter skipped a breath and wondered if he might best be on his way.

  The defecator stared, unblinking, and spoke coolly. “I see you there. And you see me. You like to watch.”

  “Did you say I like to watch?”

  “Mmmm.”

  “Watch what? Watch you?”

  “Mmmm. And other folks in other places, too.” The defecator winked a woolly eyebrow down over a yellowed sliver of eye, and nodded.

  “I think you’re mistaken.”

  “You look like a dancer to me, young man. You like to dance?”

  His upper lip curled to show fangs of empty space, a black gap on either side of eroded central incisors.

  “Not especially.”

  “You just like to watch them dance, then.”

  “Watch who? I’m sorry… I have to get to work.” Lowell turned toward Monroe, took a few steps, and paused.

  As he pivoted on his right foot and peeked back over his shoulder, he caught a shadow expanding at an alarming velocity.

  In a rapid sweep of the space around him, he noticed the defecator was gone, and galloping in his direction was Norman Peck, Lowell’s neighbor.

  “Lowell! Wait up!” Norman puffed out words encased in steam as he approached.

  “Norman, did you see a man in the parking lot?”

  “No.” Norman’s face cinched up as he halted and caught his breath where Lowell had just stood. He watched Lowell pass him and glance around the far corner of the restaurant. “Wait, in a car, or standing?”

  “There’s no one there now.”

  “No, I know.”

  Lowell passed Norman again, moving back toward Monroe. “Then why did you ask if he was in a car or standing?”

  “I don’t know.”

  They walked for a couple of blocks, Norman trying to figure out whether Lowell’s headphones were on, and Lowell listening to muffled street sounds, hoping Norman wouldn’t figure out that his headphones were off.

  As they crossed over Meigs Street, les
s than a half mile from Oxford, Norman gave up trying to guess, and leaned in near Lowell’s closest ear. “What was he doing?”

  “What was who doing?”

  “Who were you looking for back there?”

  “You look like a dancer to me, young man. You like to dance?”

  Norman blinked. His eyebrows arched halfway to his hairline and fell back like caterpillars doing pushups in unison. He blinked again.

  His mouth hung in a silent “O” until he could coax out a shaky “I’m… sorry?”

  “Why?”

  “No, I meant ‘What?’”

  “What what?”

  “Do I dance?”

  Lowell stopped and considered Norman fully. He cocked his head clockwise slightly and studied the contours of Norman’s face. He could see something like—

  Fear? No, not so extreme.

  Maybe confusion.

  Embarrassment?

  At just under six feet tall, Norman was a few inches shorter than Lowell. They had the same slight build, and dressed similarly: khakis, boots, dark wool coats, military watches, conservative shirts. Lowell could appreciate their common bent for the sartorially simple, but Norman was dull otherwise. Harmless and basically dull. Inoffensive. But apparently hygienic, so he was tolerable.

  “I don’t care whether you dance or not, Norman. Just follow my lead if you do—and don’t step on my toes or I’ll leave you spinning alone on the parquet.”

  They walked off together in silence, eventually parting ways to jobs on either side of the Genesee.

  [Four]

  The workload of a law firm foot messenger in a downtown of his city’s size suited Lowell well, in his estimation.

  It took him just under twenty minutes to walk from one extreme of his delivery range to the other if he was feeling ambitious about his job.

  Most days he was not.

  The vast majority of his stops were within five minutes of his office, though, and on a typical day he expected to be sent out with no more than fifteen envelopes and small packages to be dropped on counters, and into bins and the manicured pincers of receptionists, who smiled at couriers like missionaries at lepers.